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Remembering David Carr

David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, died yesterday at the age of 58. For anyone who had worked with Carr, reading his obituary was equal parts shocking and not. “Mr. Carr collapsed in the Times newsroom.” Of course he did. “Earlier in the evening, he moderated a panel discussion about the film Citizenfour with its principal subject, Edward J. Snowden; the film’s director, Laura Poitras; and Glenn Greenwald, a journalist.” Of course he had.

David Carr was never not working, and his reporter’s nose was always sniffing out the most critical and relevant media story of the week. Having spent years addicted to crack cocaine, an experience he would describe in a 2008 memoir, The Night of the Gun, Carr was an improbable Timesman to the say the least. But he was also an indispensible one, and, as the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, wrote in an email to staff last night, “He was our biggest champion.”

Carr’s Media Equation column had long been required reading for journalists in the industry, but, mirroring the seismic shifts in the business he was covering, his audience cracked opened in recent years and broadened to include all readers for whom social media is a routine part of life. Though he was early to see this profound change coming, and often the most acute at distilling it, when it came to reporting, Carr was old-school, with an old-school grasp of the difference between information and branding.

You can detect this in his hundreds of columns, which came week after week for nearly a decade, but nowhere is it more vividly on display than in an exchange Carr had on camera with the editors of ViceMagazine in Page One, the 2011 documentary about the newsroom in which Carr spent his days. Carr was at the Vice offices to report on what was then a new partnership between the magazine and CNN.

“I want you to feel me on this,” Carr says. “I don’t do corporate portraiture. What the fuck is going on that you’re doing business with CNN?”

“We know how to speak to young people,” a fedora-wearing Vice editor responds. “They’re listening to us. We’re a trusted brand for them.”

“Everyone is talking about cannibalism,” another Vice editor, Shane Smith, starts to explain, describing a recent Vice trip to Liberia. “And the New York Times meanwhile is writing about surfing. And I’m sitting there going, you know what, I’m not going to talk about surfing. I’m going to talk about cannibalism—”

“Just a sec," Carr cuts in. "Time out. Before you ever went there, we’ve had reporters there reporting on genocide after genocide. Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and went and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do.”

“I’m just saying,” Smith says. “I’m not a journalist. I’m not there to report—”